Editor Hot On Heels Of Stories Fromsouth

October 29, 1986|By Nancy Pate, Sentinel Book Critic

Writers often compare the structure of a novel to that of a house, that of a short story to a window in a house. If you keep that comparison in mind, then Shannon Ravenel is literature's pre-eminent Peeping Tom. She reads 2,000 short stories a year.

''I love short stories and I love reading them,'' said Ravenel, who was in Orlando last month for the Southeast Booksellers Association convention. ''It is extremely exhausting -- just the sheer mass of reading. But I've been doing it for 10 years now.''

Ravenel, who lives in St. Louis and who was a fiction editor at Houghton Mifflin in the 1960s and early 1970s, is the editor for two short story anthologies.

Since 1977, she has been the continuing editor of Houghton Mifflin's The Best American Short Stories, the distinguished annual series that started in 1915. Each year, Ravenel selects 120 stories from the thousands published in the past year in American and Canadian literary journals and magazines. Then a well-known short-story writer, acting as a guest editor, chooses 20 of the stories for the anthology.

Ravenel also is the editor for New Stories from the South, a new annual series started this year by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. She was one of the North Carolina publishing house's founders in 1983, and is its senior editor. With short stories and Southern writing enjoying renewed national interest, an anthology of Southern short stories was a natural project for Algonquin.

''And with my experience with the Best American series, it seemed a natural project for me,'' Ravenel said. ''It was an easy book to do in a sense because I was already doing the reading. The difficult part is deciding what is 'Southern'.''

Ravenel, who was born in Charleston, S.C., initially considered selecting only stories by Southern writers.

''But it's hard to define even that,'' she said. ''Did it mean just those writers born and raised in the South, or just those living here now? Willie Morris just recently moved back South and what about William Styron? He hasn't lived here for years. So I ruled that out. Finally, I got down to what is a Southern story, and for me, it meant not just that the story had a sense of place, but that it had a strong feeling for place as home.''

In her introduction to New Stories from the South, Ravenel expounds on that idea and quotes John Corrington White and Miller Williams, who edited an anthology of Southern stories 20 years ago: ''The Southerner is not the only person who knows where his home is. But he is one of the few to whom it matters very much.''

As it turned out, 15 of the 17 stories in New Stories from the South were written by writers born and raised in the South, and another by a writer who has lived in the South for some time. But one story's author, Ron Carlson, lives in Utah.

''He did say he had once driven slowly through Natchez,'' Ravenel said. ''His story, 'Air,' though, really spoke to me of place and home.''

As difficult as ''Southern'' is to define, so are the qualities that make a good short story.

''Many people are under the impression that a short story is practice for writing a novel,'' Ravenel said. ''That's just not so. The form is every bit as demanding as a novel, and I think a writer has to be more technically skillful to carry it off. I really admire what Anne Tyler calls the 'spendthrift' story, a story that somehow seems bigger than the sum of its parts.''

In the decade since Ravenel became annual editor for The Best American Short Stories anthology, the short story has gone through something of a renaissance, with more anthologies and collections being published each year. ''There are more people writing and going to writing programs and writing workshops,'' Ravenel said. ''You work on short things in workshops, usually short stories. The workshops have created a very, very big group of writers. Many of them are new names for readers, and many of them are extremely talented.

''It's certainly not hard to find stories for the anthologies because there are plenty to choose from, a real wealth. There are not just more short stories, there are more good short stories.''